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Big Think and the Mental Health Channel are proud to launch Big Thinkers on Mental Health, a new series dedicated to open discussion of anxiety, depression, and the many other psychological disorders that affect millions worldwide.

Brain Exercise: How to Build a Brain

The question of when we’ll be able to build a brain to act and think like us is so far off in the future in my opinion but it’s interesting to think about because it forces you to actually see what you have and to try to quantify it in a way that could be instantiated in an artifact. That’s a very powerful intellectual exercise for sure, but the details of that involve figuring out the fine connections that are going to underlie so many of the differences between all of us. It is just a horrendous problem. We can barely figure out the C. Elegans, a little worm that has a very small number of neurons where we have trillions of interactions.

So I think it’s a long way off and I don’t think we’ve conceptualized yet well enough how the brain gets its job done to maybe abstract all of that activity in our brain into meaningful units to which we can then think about how to move those around to build a brain. I just think we’re too far away from that, but that doesn’t mean we don’t know a tremendous amount about the brain and how it does its work, which has exploded in the last 50 or 60 years.